Select language

Dear visitor! This page provides a means to specify your preferred
language; this selection will have priority over the preferences set
in your browser. In order to do this,
we set a cookie;
you can reset it with the first option in this list, and your browser
will reset it at the end of your session.

How do you know my native language? Are you spying on us?

As you browse the Web, your browser sends a header with the request
of any document that indicates your language preference. This is
usually something you can configure in your browser settings. If you
downloaded a browser localized in Danish, it probably came
preconfigured to send Accept-Language: da. Our servers
are configured to respond to this header by providing the page in the
requested language, if the translation exists; otherwise, the original
English page is sent.

We recently added a “Set Language” link on the top of
each page to allow you to override that setting and “fix”
a certain language different from your browser's default setting. For
example, you could choose English to browse gnu.org even if
your browser is set to Danish. This feature uses a cookie.

If you're concerned about your privacy on the Web you can try the
Tor Browser Bundle available from
https://torproject.org/.
Among many other improvements over generic browsers with regard to
privacy, the TBB comes configured to appear to be like a
Windows-based, US-English browser.

You're right that the language setting of your browser can be used
by some sites or third-parties to identify your specific browser and
target you for advertising. Tor provides the safest way we know to
avoid such targeting. Nevertheless, the GNU project does not use this
nor any other targeting methods, not even cookies (exception made of
the optional language override mentioned above): we simply
care for our users and have no interest in spying on you. The
Accept-Language header is a common way to localize
contents according to user preferences. You can
learn more about it from the W3C.

We also do not track IP addresses of our visitors, and the site
itself is mostly made of static pages, and does not use
Javascript. Rest assured that the GNU project and the FSF are very
careful about
users' privacy.
If you have any doubt, feel free to contact us.